Data centers are becoming more prevalent, as various institutions seek to centralize computing and data storage resources in a single location. Many such data centers are dedicated to a particular institution and can be housed in that institution's facility directly. Other data centers can be of a multi-tenant arrangement, in which various resources of different customers of the data center are present in a single data center location.
In addition to these data center models, cloud computing is also becoming predominant. In general, cloud computing means that various resources can be flexibly allocated to multiple entities to provide for on-demand computing resources as needs dictate. Such entities can range from individual users to large corporations.
It is oftentimes difficult to efficiently allocate such cloud resources to requesters, given variances in the requests as well as the uncertainties regarding usage patterns and so forth. These challenges include a need to share a network broadcast domain, a need to allow space for organic growth within a given server collection, and a need to reduce a customer's risk to multiple failures at the same time, among others.